The H.264 video codec system includes, as part of the main profile, a context adaptive binary arithmetic-coding (CABAC) program. While decoding input bits from an encoded bitstream, all contexts need to go through renormalization. The renormalization process needs a comparison operation, a shift operation, and an ADD operation to be performed 0 to 6 times. Each comparison operation, shift operation and ‘OR’ operation consumes 0 to 6 input bits. The renormalization operation performed on contexts are needed to decode the output binary symbol (bin). Contexts that need 0 or 1 input bits can perform a renormalization operation in the same cycle. However, when more than one bit is needed, additional cycles are needed.
Conventional methods use one cycle every time an input bit is consumed. Such consumption needs a maximum of 5 cycles to perform renormalization. The additional cycles used to perform renormalization takes away from decoding operation time and degrades the performance of an arithmetic decoder.